Late last year, Obihai announced in a blog article, new services were coming to owners of unlocked OBi devices, that would provide a reliable telephone service at a great price. These services would be easy to set-up, come with critical features needed for a home user, and be priced at just $40 per year – that’s only about $3.33 per month and includes all fees and taxes required by the government for delivering such a service.

Today, we would like to inform everyone, Obihai have partnered with Anveo to deliver the first such offering as part of the launch of the public-facing OBiTALK Approved Service Provider (ASP) program. We are excited to announce it first to OBiTALK forum readers, to anyone visiting the OBiTALK portal and soon (as the word spreads), to those who notice related discussions and future promotions we are planning that highlight the best and smartest BYOD VoIP solution available today.

CLICK HERE to go to the Anveo offer landing page on the OBiTALK portal (sign-in required). From here, visitors will be taken to Anveo's web site where they can sign-up for a service, pay with a credit card or PayPal and then have that service automatically configured on their OBi device. That's it!

We think Anveo is an excellent launch partner for the OBiTALK ASP program. Anveo has a great reputation for innovation and service in the BYOD VoIP community of end-users and resellers. Anveo has also consistently delivered reliable emergency calling service to thousands of OBi device owners using a Google Voice number as their primary line.

Today’s announcement is a ‘soft-launch’ of sorts. We want to work-out any unforeseen hitches and fix them, quickly. Also, we can take your feedback on usability and suggested enhancements and make improvements. Then, very soon, we will start to make noise in the press and media as well as socialize OBiTALK ASP solutions to the hundreds of thousands of OBiTALK users who own and use OBi devices with Google Voice. We also believe many more industrious families will realize their hard-earned money is getting 'jacked' with their current phone service and immediately see the ultimate value and total control they get when they switch to an OBi-based VoIP service.

There is an OBiTALK ASP landing page as well. CLICK HERE to check it out. This is where we will encourage OBi device owners to add SIP services to their OBi devices. We hope to have a broad selection of OBiTALK ASP partners, whose services will match the wide-ranging needs of OBi device owners.

The OBiTALK ASP program will evolve to support multiple service offers that are only available to individuals, families and businesses with OBi VoIP devices (ATAs, IP Phones, etc.). Because, even though at the core, we are a Silicon Valley, California-based technology company that designs, makes and manufactures cloud-managed communication solutions for residential and small business applications, we feel that our innovations have the greatest impact if we can tightly couple them with product plus service-provider solutions that deliver the best value for money to the end-user.

If you have any questions or comments about the OBiTALK Approved Service Provider program, or would like to become an OBiTALK ASP partner please send email to partner@obihai.com .

I'm surprised this was not a more competitive package--especially the limited # of outgoing minutes. There are way to many better options out there. As much as I like my Obi I would dump it and use netTalk before I would take this option.

It does not show you how you can get to keep your google voice number, does anyone has any other recommendation to keep your google voice number even by using other products? I am thinking MagicJack is cheaper?!

does anyone has any other recommendation to keep your google voice number even by using other products?

When you sign-up for the service, you will be asked what number you would like to present to the people you call as your Caller ID. Here, you enter your Google Voice number. The number will be verified to belong to you. Once verified, when you make a call from the phone attached to the OBi, the caller will see your GV number.

For inbound calls, you will need to enter the number given to you by the OBiTALK Approved Service Provider (e.g. Anveo) as a forwarded phone. Just go to this page (link) and select Add another phone. Once you do this, when someone calls your GV number, the phone connected to the OBi will ring.

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I heard Ooma can still support googlevoice, I believe that's my next device.

That would be a poor choice. You will need to pay $150 for the device + $150 for the service (That's $300 for your first year alone!) and then another $150 per year, every year for service fees. taxes and the Ooma Premier option to get the GV extension capability.

Anveo seems like a non-starter to me... too expensive and not enough minutes. Very disappointed with Obihai that they would choose this partner and negotiate these packages... especially knowing that Obivoice was out there delighting customers with lower pricing and great service.

I tend to agree with what others have said; the limited number of minutes makes this a non-starter. At the moment it appears that Obivoice has the better offer, since they say they offer unlimited minutes. Which I realize is deceptive because no VoIP provider is going to give anyone a truly unlimited number of minutes, but still it's not a paltry 250 minutes. 250 minutes is almost an insult; that's what people get from those cell phone service providers that offer a free phone and free service to those with annual income of 135% of poverty level or less.

Whoever thought this was a good deal to offer to Obihai users needs to seriously re-think that. The post implies that more such offers will be coming (perhaps from other VoIP providers?) and I would certainly hope that there will be something better than this offered in the future.

I wonder how your account looks in Anveo with one of these programs. Do you still get the call flow. Do you still get the address book?

I was told in another thread that Anveo accounts get to use the call flow and address book. So that gives you some power, as well as if your callers are just friends and family you can add them to the address book and don't really need CNAME.

Current cost for Anveo Personal Unlimited number is $2.00 plus $0.80 for E911 per moth. So adding 250 minutes outgoing which for US48 is $0.01/min would be another $2.50. So already, if you are using no more than that in outgoing minutes you can have a better deal on this program vs rolling your own. Sure, more minutes would be nice, but at .01 for each minute over, you are not being penalized. You are simply getting the going rate. (assuming US48)

I have to assume margins on these services for non commercial operations are pretty tight, so being able to squeeze a bit more out is a good thing.

250 min/month outgoing isn't enough as my primary line, but I'm thinking about the upgrade since I already have an Anveo incoming line and E911 ($2.80/month, so this would be ~$0.50 more; should be fine as a second outgoing line).

So is it easy to sign up for this and use my existing Anveo account (phone number, E911 Info)?

Hello ObiTalk: Both my wife and I have our own (different) GV numbers. To make outgoing calls on our Obi, she dials her desired outgoing number to present her GV number on the recipient's phone. When I make an outgoing call, I dial **2 followed by the number I am calling to show my GV number on the recipient's phone. This has been a real plus for us. If I follow the process you describe (which I haven't yet), it appears I can only replace SP1 or SP2, but not both. Is it possible with one Anveo line and one OBi box to duplicate the outgoing SP1 and SP2 Caller ID features we now enjoy? If not, what would it take to duplicate this capability?

How can you get the deal if you want to set it up yourself? I configure my Obi manually.

My complete guess is that once you setup the account, you get access to Aveno's customer website which gives you access to your sip username, password, sip proxy servers, audio codecs supported, protocols supported, configuration of dilaing format, outbound caller id, internal callerid/default extension, enable MWI and generate artificial ringback tone as well as sip status alerts. Should be all you need to do manual configuration.

How can you get the deal if you want to set it up yourself? I configure my Obi manually.

My complete guess is that once you setup the account, you get access to Aveno's customer website which gives you access to your sip username, password, sip proxy servers, audio codecs supported, protocols supported, configuration of dilaing format, outbound caller id, internal callerid/default extension, enable MWI and generate artificial ringback tone as well as sip status alerts. Should be all you need to do manual configuration.

If you don't register your Obi device on Obitalk you can't even start the signup process! It makes you pick which Obi you want to install the service on. Only Option I see is to add the Obi to Obitalk and then remove it. I have never used the Obitalk portal for management of my Obi and I don't want to start now.

It does not show you how you can get to keep your google voice number, does anyone has any other recommendation to keep your google voice number even by using other products? I am thinking MagicJack is cheaper?!

Ok I don't think you got the real answer you were looking for, so here is my suggestions.

Firstly Ooma isn't supporting googlevoice in the way you think. What they are doing is the same thing that has been suggested here by everyone who is trying to keep their googlevoice post XMPP. Which is simply as follows:

For Incoming calls: They give you a call-in phone number and then have you configure this phone number on googlevoice as a number to forward calls to.

For Outgoing calls: They spoof your googlevoice callerid as the outgoing call

This appears to be what Ooma is doing, which contrary to what you think is not true GV support. For starters the outgoing calls will never show up in googlevoice. But for practically 99% of users, this is a non-issue

Currently there is no device that I have seen that natively supports the Google Hangouts protocol other than the device Google announced to break into the videoconference market.

Now that we cleared up how they are achieving googlevoice support after May 15 shutdown, we now get to your first question.

There are plenty of options available including Ooma which according to posts on this board is a $300 starting option. That is just plain ridiculous from a cost perspective considering there is this offering from Obitalk of 40$ per year but with only 250mins/month is also not acceptable for many users.

There is ObiVoice that is offering 40$ annually with 2000mins/month or 50$ for unlimited minutes.

You can practically get any other voip provider for that matter that gives you a call-in number and use it in exactly the same way I indicated above.